The GOP talked about getting rid of same-day registration, but in the end they didn't; it wasn't in the bill that introduced the photo ID requirement.

The new 28-day residency requirement, though, is particularly problematic for the current June election, since it is less than 28 days since the end of the academic year when many students left residence and returned to their home areas. This has caused a lot of confusion over where students are supposed to vote.

I don't want to pick a fight, but if you can't figure out how to register to vote (with Wisconsin's extremely [small L] liberal registration laws), than you shouldn't be in college or vote for that matter.

State Residency is not Ward residency. You can easily prove state residency AND Ward residency in a students case. It is ONE SMALL extra step in an EXTREMELY permissive process.

FYI, We almost never take people off the rolls, unless someone asks/demands to be, so just go to the easiest place (for you) that you are on the voter roll. ex: your parent's house's ward.

The backup workers were needed to handle long lines, partly because a significant number of new voters were registering at the polls, Edman said.

“We knew things would be busy, but we didn’t know how busy,” Edman said.

In some cases, poll workers were shifted from less-crowded polling places to busier ones, Edman said. In other cases, she used poll workers who had agreed to be on call or city administrators who had volunteered to help out, she said.

Voting machines broke down or jammed twice at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church and once each at Manitoba School and the OASIS Senior Center, Edman said. Each time, voters were asked to place their ballots in secure bins so that poll workers could feed them into the machines after they were repaired, usually within 15 or 20 minutes, she said.

That was a smaller number of voting machine problems than the city usually encounters, Edman said.

And confusion arose at the Zablocki Library, when poll workers told some registered voters their names weren’t listed in the poll books.

The first time Megan Knudson went to vote, she was informed that her name did not appear in the poll book for Ward 260 and she was offered the opportunity to re-register.

“I chose to leave the polls,” Knudson said.

Redistricting is to blame for Knudson’s and other residents’ confusion, Edman said.

In previous rounds of redistricting, state law required county boards to draw supervisory district lines first. Then municipalities drew municipal ward lines and aldermanic district lines to avoid splitting wards between supervisory or aldermanic districts. Finally, the Legislature used the wards to build legislative and congressional districts.

But in 2011, the Legislature amended the law to let legislative redistricting take precedence, as Republican legislative leaders rushed to push their redistricting plan through before the first round of Senate recall elections. That forced county and municipal governments to re-draw their maps to conform to the state lines.

During the revision process, Milwaukee County officials accidentally left two city wards that were each split between two supervisory districts, one on the southwest side and one on the west side, Edman said. That included Ward 260, where part of the ward was temporarily designated 260Q, she said.

Poll workers in the recall primary were aware of the issue, but election officials forgot to tell those working in Tuesday’s election, Edman said. The workers did not know that a separate poll book had been printed for Ward 260Q and that it was behind the book printed for Ward 260, said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the state Government Accountability Board.

After she had learned from the Milwaukee Election Commission about the Ward 260Q situation, Knudson returned to the poll at the library. She explained the situation to a poll worker who found her name in the correct book.

“My main worry is that there would be many people in my situation, and they would not be comfortable advocating for themselves,” Knudson said.

Problems with the ward lines are expected to be corrected in time for the fall primary in August, Edman said.

At about 1:10pm I was the 356 voter at Madison School Board Offices, which is right next to the Kohl Center just off campus in downtown Madison. Unless people are planning on voting later tonight, this seems to be the effect of having the election during the summer and not during the school year.

At about 1:10pm I was the 356 voter at Madison School Board Offices, which is right next to the Kohl Center just off campus in downtown Madison. Unless people are planning on voting later tonight, this seems to be the effect of having the election during the summer and not during the school year.

Woah, that is atrocious turnout. How many students stick around for the summer?

No statewide figures were available, but local election officials offered fairly similar accounts of a heavy turnout in communities large and small, in both Democratic and Republican areas.

In many places, election officials said turnout was as strong as, or stronger than, it was for the 2010 gubernatorial election. A few even compared it to the 2008 presidential election.

With Wisconsin voters sharply - and almost evenly - divided between the candidates and few undecided, political observers believe turnout will hold the key to victory for either Republican Gov. Scott Walker or his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.

Heavy turnout in Milwaukee led the city's Election Commission to call out the reserves.

The backup workers were needed to handle long lines, partly because a significant number of new voters were registering at the polls, Edman said.

"We knew things would be busy, but we didn't know how busy," Edman said.

In some cases, poll workers were shifted from less-crowded polling places to busier ones, Edman said. In other cases, she used poll workers who had agreed to be on call or city administrators who had volunteered to help out, she said.

For Dane County, the other major Democratic stronghold, 27% of registered voters had cast ballots by 11 a.m., "definitely a larger turnout than 2010," County Clerk Karen Peters said.

But Walker's base also appeared to be turning out strongly. In the Village of Pewaukee, where the Republican beat Barrett by more than a 2-to-1 margin in 2010, 1,300 voters had cast ballots at the village's two voting sites by 11:15 a.m., in addition to 700 absentee ballots previously cast, according to Paul Boening, the village's deputy clerk. The village has 4,500 registered voters, of whom about 3,700 cast ballots in 2010, Boening said.

In Delafield there was a lunch-hour rush at Christ the King Lutheran Church, where by noon 2,076 voters, including absentees, had cast ballots.

Gina Gresch, the City of Delafield Clerk-Treasurer, said 4,688 voters are registered in the city. She said at least 100 new voters registered on Election Day. Delafield also went for Gov. Scott Walker by a better than 2 to 1 margin in 2010.

In Brown County, Deputy Clerk Sandy Juno said, "We're hearing from the (municipal) clerks that they feel the turnout today so far has been busier than what it was in the 2008 presidential election. We've had requests to print 15,000 additional ballots. As of yesterday, we had already printed over 100,000."

Washington County Clerk Brenda Jaszewski also reported heavy turnout.

For Paul and Susan Gouvion, the Tuesday morning traffic jam near Wilson Elementary School in Wauwatosa was a welcome sight. Cars were parked on both sides of side streets and busy Glenview Ave. outside the polling place."In all of the 50 years that we've lived here, we've never seen this many people voting," Susan Gouvion said. "This is really the American way. There are so many things that are important in this election."

Inside the school, the line stretched well out of the gym and had been that way all morning.

For Katie Nunag, the recall election day is also the date her second child is due to come along.

Although she was very pregnant, Katie walked three blocks to the polls at Wilson School, while pushing her 2-year-old daughter, Charlie, in a stroller.

"I've got to do my civic duty," she said cheerily. Also, she was hoping the walk might bring on labor.

Charlie was a bit disappointed that her mom was going to vote. She thought Katie had said they were going on a boat.

Few voting problems were reported. On its Twitter account, @Wisconsin_GAB, the state Government Accountability Board said police were called after a voting machine was found damaged in the Village of Rothschild in Marathon County.

In Milwaukee, voting machines broke down or jammed twice at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church and once each at Manitoba School and the OASIS Senior Center, Edman said. Each time, voters were asked to place their ballots in secure bins so that poll workers could feed them into the machines after they were repaired, usually within 15 or 20 minutes, she said.

That was a smaller number of voting machine problems than the city usually encounters, Edman said.

This is tonight? Great. I'll probably find out about the results in two days time.

Somehow I'd be even less surprised by a result on either outer edge of a Walker by 9 to Barrett by 1 corridor than it's middle.

Logged

If I'm shown as having been active here recently it's either because I've been using the gallery, because I've been using the search engine looking up something from way back, or because I've been reading the most excellent UK by-elections thread again.

MILWAUKEE — Brenda Lewison was concerned. She was supervising a polling place located in what should be the very beating heart of the effort to replace Scott Walker. The polling place itself was inside the headquarters of the Milwaukee Public Schools. Down the block was the headquarters of the Milwaukee teachers union. Neither public schools nor the people who teach in them had fared well since Walker took over in 2011, and more than a few of the people who worked in both buildings had been out in front of the state capitol when the storm came 16 months earlier. And Tom Barrett himself voted only one district over that very morning. And Brenda was worried about running out of ballots. Not for Ward 202, but for Ward 203.

"This is what I did," she told the guy from the election board, who was sitting on a window sill, while an observer from the state Democratic party looked on. "I took the turnout from 2008 and 2010 and I averaged them, and I ordered 1100 ballots for 203. They sent me 700. And I'm also thinking that my own estimate was low. So, I sent something I thought was low, and they didn't even send me that many. The rest of them are back in the warehouse. Now, I'm thinking there's going to be a rush at about five o'clock when people get out of work, and they're telling me to call them when I get down to 100 ballots left. I'm going to call them when I have 200 ballots left, just to make sure there's enough time for them to get here."

Sometimes, I swear, given the way it runs its elections, the World's Greatest Democracy could elect Mr. Ed to something before anyone noticed.

And it all falls on people like Brenda, especially on a day like this, the culminating election of a superheated political contest that shows no signs of abating no matter who winds up winning. In addition to that, when Walker and the Republican legislature pushed through a voter-ID law, Brenda had to be trained in enforcing that, only to have all the work go for naught when a judge ruled in March that the law was unconstitutional. "It wasn't that bad," she said. "We just went back to the way it was before." With some adjustments. Earlier that morning, Brenda had to turn away a young woman who'd presented a proof-of-residence on her iPhone because the state requires a hard paper copy for that purpose. The young woman went home to get a copy of the lease on her apartment. "That's tough on young people," Brenda had said. "Most young people don't do anything on paper."

"The legislature made a list of the kind of ID's that were acceptable," she said. "Then, of course, that became useless because the law got stopped. So then they made a list of what kinds of proof-of-residence were acceptable."

The people kept coming. The pile of ballots grew smaller and smaller. Brenda kept her eye on it.

Dane County could get to 80% to 88%! Add this with the huge turn out in Milwaukee and the Milwaukee suburbs and we could be approaching 2008 levels.

Wouldn't students not be registered in WI but their home state?

More likely their home town... most UW-System (even UW-Madison) students are Wisconsinites.

This is an interesting question, are there more students in Wisconsin in summer or during school year? I know that Northeast gets more students from other regions obviously, but what about Midwest? Maybe school being out is an actual bonus to student turnout in WI? Also some schools aren't out yet, like we are having finals week here at UW here today, but I think we are really in minority here.

Dane County could get to 80% to 88%! Add this with the huge turn out in Milwaukee and the Milwaukee suburbs and we could be approaching 2008 levels.

Wouldn't students not be registered in WI but their home state?

You can register to vote in Wisconsin after living at your residency for 28 days (previously 10 days) so a lot of out of state students do vote in Wisconsin elections. I've heard that absentee ballots in Dane County are around 16,000, so maybe that's some of the students.

Dane County could get to 80% to 88%! Add this with the huge turn out in Milwaukee and the Milwaukee suburbs and we could be approaching 2008 levels.

Wouldn't students not be registered in WI but their home state?

More likely their home town... most UW-System (even UW-Madison) students are Wisconsinites.

This is an interesting question, are there more students in Wisconsin in summer or during school year? I know that Northeast gets more students from other regions obviously, but what about Midwest? Maybe school being out is an actual bonus to student turnout in WI? Also some schools aren't out yet, like we are having finals week here at UW here today, but I think we are really in minority here.

Probably more students during the school year. There is a big draw of students from Minnesota, because of the reciprocity agreement, and Illinois that come to school here in Wisconsin.